On Monday, JJ Redick revealed that Bronny James and Dalton Knecht were both excused absences from practice on Monday. Both were ill, a statement The Athletic felt compelled to confirm in a follow-up report because, well, it seemed more like they both had a concerning case of Roster Bubble-itis. The Los Angeles Lakers spent most of the offseason with 16 players under standard contracts. Monday was the deadline to trim the roster down to 15, and the two likeliest candidates to get moved were their two 2024 draft picks.

Redick himself said that he didn't think James played well in the preseason. He shot just 4-of-16 from the floor, and the Lakers lost his 82 minutes by 31 points. Yet the bar, apparently, was even lower, as it was ultimately Knecht, the No. 17 pick in that 2024 class, who was waived. All told, the pair of them and everything that has followed amounts to an abject disaster of a draft class for Rob Pelinka. Consider the following:

• Through two years, neither James nor Knecht have grown into NBA-caliber players. James, as a late-second round pick, was always fighting long odds. Knecht, frequently cited as the steal of that draft, was supposed to be a difference-maker early on. He entered the NBA as a 23-year-old coming off of an SEC Player of the Year season with a skill set that seemingly fit the existing roster to a tee. Aside from a few flashes early in his rookie year, he showed virtually nothing as a Laker.
• The Lakers tried to trade Knecht to the Charlotte Hornets. They called off the deal after failing Mark Williams' physical and could never move Knecht, or rebuild his confidence, afterward.
• Though they'd deny it, the Lakers surely drafted James, on some level, for the sake of preserving their relationship with his far more valuable father. Well, if Bronny was supposed to be a bridge between player and team, he failed on that front. LeBron James literally took a minimum-salary contract to play for somebody else.
• The Lakers didn't realize neither had a future with them quickly enough to move on last offseason when doing so would have allowed the flexibility to retain key defender Jordan Goodwin, who actually was an important part of the 2024-25 rotation and wound up breaking out for the Phoenix Suns after the Lakers let him go.
• The Lakers had a whole offseason to move either Knecht, James or someone else. They could have demanded it as a condition of trading nearly their entire cache of draft picks to the Utah Jazz for Walker Kessler. They could have signed one fewer free agent or made an aggregation trade. Instead, these picks went so badly that the Lakers were forced to take on the dead money that would come from waiving one of them. They couldn't even close the book on this miserable draft prooperly.

At least to this point, the 2024 draft class has been a failure at every level. The Lakers picked the wrong players, developed them poorly and mismanaged the process of moving on from them. It's emblematic of many of the failures that have come under Pelinka. The Lakers land big-name players because they're the Lakers, and then they botch the margins around them.

Why did the Lakers keep Bronny over Knecht?

Why exactly James outlasted Knecht could come down to a number of factors. The more defensively oriented James is arguably the better fit on this offense-centric roster than Knecht, whose best trait is theoretically his shooting. James is undeniably the bigger name of the two just because of, well, his actual name. Technically speaking, the Lakers still have a LeBron James on their team. Neither played well in the preseason. We don't know what happened behind closed doors at training camp practices. James presumably outplayed Knecht there.

That doesn't mean he's proven he has an NBA future. At this point, it's getting harder and harder to believe that's the case. James simply is not an NBA-viable offensive player. Through two years, he has not proven capable of putting the ball through the hoop from anywhere on the court at the rate that a 6-foot-2 guard needs to in order to be playable. Even if he could hit the bare minimum number of shots to survive as a small, defense-first guard, it's not as though he's cleared the incredibly high bar a defender needs to in order to provide genuine value at that size. He is not a Jamal Shead-level pest. That's the standard at that size. James has never reached it.

Maybe that changes. Again, the Lakers have seen more of James, and Knecht for that matter, than we have, and it should be noted that James at least provided a handful of not-terrible minutes against the Houston Rockets in the playoffs a year ago. Development isn't linear. Maybe there's more to Bronny than we've thus far seen.

But when teams are forced to decide between two young and underwhelming players, the first-round pedigree, along with the greater cap number for the sake of trade flexibility, usually wins out. Even if there was more to the decision to keep James, it was fundamentally driven by how badly the Lakers mismanaged the Knecht situation. The Lakers bungled the 2024 draft so badly that a player who's done little to prove future NBA viability through two years had to make the team just because their other selection in that same class was worse. His continued presence on this roster, therefore, says far more about the team that drafted him than the player he's thus far become.